but a technique
for expressing and embodying that national vision. To deserve our way
with them they must know we have a vision which can be proved, which is
historic--the facts of which--specifications, dates, names and places,
can be placed in their hands.

The other nations if they are going to let us have our way with them,
will want to know by observation that America has not only a vision and a
technique for embodying a vision, but that when her vision proves to be
wrong (as during the war) America has a technique for being born again.

II

THE VISION AND THE BODY

I have dwelt already on what a body for the people would be like and how
it would work.

I would now like to touch on two facts--the fact that there is a
particular and desperate need of a vision for the soul of the American
people at this time, and the fact that the body to express the vision
grows logically out of what already is and that this body is going to be
had.

The success of a nation in getting its way with other nations turns on
its having a technique for getting the attention of other nations--on its
getting connected up with a body through which its spirit can really be
expressed.

The technique for a nation getting the attention of other nations turns
on a nation's getting its own attention, upon the nation's becoming
self-conscious, upon its having a conception, upon its having a vision of
action developing within itself from which a body implacably comes forth.

This fact is not supposed to be open to argument. It is a biological
fact--the mysterious and boundless platitude of life. Everybody knows, or
thinks that he thinks that he knows it, but only a few people here and
there at a time for a short time, in America--inventors, great statesmen,
children and lovers are ever caught acting as if they believed it.

Everything about America that is lively, or powerful, or substantial and
material begins in imaginative desire, in somebody's vision or somebody's
falling in love and becoming conscious of his own desire.

The first thing this nation has to do to have a body is to get its own
attention.

The reason that the people of America in the Red Cross achieved a body,
is that some one had a body for--the vision that if all the different
kinds of people we had in America who had never dreamed of doing a thing
together before, could be got together to do one thing together now the
world war could be won.

This spectr